The decline of the gerund in technical documentation?

Louise Downe, who works at the UK’s Government Digital Service, wrote a blog post (Good services are verbs, bad services are nouns), where she stated: “After several rounds of user testing, the Home Office changed the name of ‘Immigration Health Surcharge’ to ‘check if you need to pay towards your health care in the UK’ –… Read more »

What should be on our roadmap for training courses in technical communications?

We thought it would be useful to reflect on our plans for topics and courses in technical communications. In the past, some of the best suggestions have come from customers and prospects; it’s great to pick up useful ideas from others. Today, you’ll find classroom or elearning training courses in: Technical writing (Technical Author/Technical writing Basic/Intermediate and Advanced technical writing… Read more »

What it’s like to be a Technical Author

We’re planning to carry out a number of videoed interviews with a range of Technical Authors this week. This is to help promote the profession. We’ll be asking questions such as what their role is inside their companies, and how they became a Technical Author. The videos will be uploaded to the YouTube Channel for the Institute of… Read more »

Cool tools for Technical Authors – note taking

I thought I’d share some of the tools we use at Cherryleaf, starting with note taking. I’ve not covered audio recording tools, as we’ll probably look at those in another post. Moleskine Moleskine notebooks are a great way of taking written notes. The 13cm x 21cm size provides a decent page size, whilst being small enough to… Read more »

Cherryleaf “green screen” videos

We’ve been putting together some short length videos that we can use on the Cherryleaf website. These are “quick and dirty”, three to four minute videos, shot behind in front of a green screen. One explains why technical communication is changing: Another looks at recruiting a Technical Author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJkTohd0qNg&feature=youtu.be Each video takes a couple of hours to… Read more »